Fed up of snail-slow internet and desperate for broadband, a community in
rural Lancashire have taken to their spades to dig their own 40-mile cable
trench.

Anyone visiting the village of Wray over the next few days may get the wrong idea about this tiny Lancashire hamlet. For this weekend sees the start of the annual Scarecrow Festival, which means that the streets will be full of country bumpkin figures, with turnips for noses and stalks of straw poking out of their ill-fitting jackets. Then, of course, there’s the maggot-racing, which takes place every autumn in the George and Dragon pub. All of which might lead you to believe that this is a bit of a rural backwater.

Not a bit of it. Admittedly, in terms of geography, this community is located in the lovely Vale of Lune, where the hedgerows are frequently wider than the roads. When it comes to technology, though, this is set to become one of the nation’s most groundbreaking technological hubs – literally.

Fed up with the slow download speeds and frozen computer screens of their snail-slow dial-up internet connection, the residents of Wray, and eight neighbouring parishes, have come together to dig a 40-mile trench and lay their own broadband line. It’s an extraordinary example of the Big Society in action.

At first hearing, Wray, Arkholme, Melling, Wennington, Tatham, Roeburndale, Over Wyresdale and Quernmore (pronounced Quormer) might not sound the likeliest of high-speed internet hubs. But if the £1.86 million can be raised to finance the scheme (and £300,000 is already in the bank), the inhabitants of these isolated villages will have not just views of Yorkshire, the Lake District hills and (on a good day) the Isle of Man, but connections to the information super-highway that are every bit as fast and efficient as in metropolitan New York or London.

The scheme is called Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN, or BARN, as everyone calls it) and, far from being some kind of flyaway hillbilly notion, it is rooted in firm fiscal soil.

In best community-action fashion, the participants represent a sensible cross-section of local society: farmers, teachers, businessmen, engineers, film-makers, agricultural contractors, a professor of neuropathology and a man who used to run the post office. And planted right in the middle of the project is the cast-iron principle that, while this venture might one day make a profit, any surplus income will be going straight back to the community, rather than into the pockets of the shareholders. Of whom there are already substantial numbers.

“So far, 200 people have bought shares in the enterprise at £1 a share,” says farmer Christine Conder, one of the B4RN management team, who are all volunteers. “The maximum number of shares you can have is 20,000. Quite a few people have gone for £1,500-worth and in return they get a free broadband connection [normal price £150] plus 12 months’ free subscription [normally £30 a month].”

There’s no shortage of takers, either, since the remoteness of these communities means most people are struggling with low-speed, low-capacity connections. Indeed, some 380,000 households nationwide still only have a dial-up connection.

“At present, if I want to download a large document, my internet is out of action for hours,” complains film-maker John Hamlett. The same problems afflict Christopher Mays, assistant dean at Lancaster University, who lives in Quernmore. “I’m currently saddled with an appalling service,” he says. “It allows me to access my email, but I have to download all my documents at work. Which means that, unlike other academics, it’s almost impossible for me to work from home.”

It’s not just white-collar workers who need broadband connections, either. “All our cattle need passports and we have to enter the details online,” says Christine Conder, who, along with three other generations of her family, runs a hilltop dairy farm outside Wray. “Unless those details are entered correctly and you’ve had confirmation back from Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), you can’t sell those animals on; there was a case recently where a farmer from round here sent off details for 42 cattle and they all got lost in the post. Plus, of course, VAT returns now all have to be done online. This may be a lovely place to live, but broadband availability is extremely poor. Farmers aren’t just keen on it coming here, they’re desperate for it.”

So much so that, whereas most farmers would charge a commercial internet company a fee for digging up land to lay down fibre-optic broadband cables, landowners in the Vale of Lune and the Forest of Bowland are inviting the B4RN team to come and excavate for free. Alternatively, those who are prepared to do the digging themselves can claim £1.50-worth of shares for every metre of trench they plough.

All of which creates economies of scale that just aren’t open to the big telecommunications companies. Indeed, while many rural Lancastrians are critical of firms such as BT for failing to get high-speed broadband into the remoter parts of the county, others accept that this was never going to be cost-effective for companies whose shareholders expect an annual cash pay-out, rather than a warm glow.

That said, the completion of the B4RN project is far from a foregone conclusion. The eventual plan is to lay some 40 miles of fibre-optic cable across the hillsides, supplying 1,400 homes with internet speeds of one gigabit per second – roughly 10 times faster than at present. However, while a recent Dig for Broadband event brought out 142 spade-wielding, volunteer trench-creators, and the scheme’s first phase should be completed this summer, it may take a year or more before the whole area is broadband‑enabled.

And that depends, of course, on the rest of the money being raised. Which involves the B4RN team charming local Lancastrians with tea and cake.

“We find that chocolate cake works best,” says Christine Conder. “That said, once you do demonstrate the benefits of high-speed broadband for people, the penny really drops.”

Indeed, while not everyone needs to submit their VAT returns or heifers’ vital statistics online, there are plenty of older people in the area who are realising that better internet access would mean they could have two-way video conversations with their grandchildren on Skype (Christine’s seven granddaughters, for example, live in Manchester, Wales and the USA). In the same way, locals who are housebound could have local church services streamed live into their home or even have conference‑call consultations with their GP or hospital specialist.

Landowners, too, are twigging that it would be useful, for security purposes, to have broadband-enabled CCTV cameras trained on the end of their lane, or on the barn containing their prize bull. In recognition of the many species that could be protected by such CCTV cameras – otters, voles and many others – the body in charge of the Forest of Bowland Area of Natural Beauty has come up with £5,000 to help fund B4RN’s leaflets, posters and newspaper advertisements.

Of course, demand for fast-access applies at the junior end of the age scale, too. “A lot of schoolchildren now need the internet for their homework,” says B4RN volunteer Monica Lee, a farmer and management consultant who lives outside Quernmore. “They’re told to go home and look up 20 facts on the internet, but children who live out in the countryside with poor internet access have great difficulties.”

Indeed, it’s these inconvenient facts of rural life that make living in the country so unappealing to young people in general. B4RN’s members are not only fighting for broadband access – they’re fighting to sustain their whole way of life. “Two decades ago, there were 20 or 30 kids in the area, now there are two or three,” says John Hamlett. “My son is 11 and there’s no one his age living here any more. Agriculture has suffered in recent years, which means that this area increasingly survives on retirement income or commuters. What high-speed broadband offers is an opportunity for people to come and work here, and for this area to become industrially competent once again. It’s not just farmers who will benefit. It’s everyone.”